


Charity

by o_antiva



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Anders Week 2017, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 21:23:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11322018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/o_antiva/pseuds/o_antiva
Summary: A short for Anders Week 2017, theme: Charity.Anders recalls the time he and Wynne were let out of the Circle Tower to help a woman in childbirth.





	Charity

Greagoir let him out of the tower once. While the templars stripped him, searched him, and re-dressed him in robes they brought for him, so that he wouldn't hide a pick-- like he had done last time-- Greagoir circled him and told him in nasal tones how he squandered his gifts. A Spirit Healer possessed rare talents. The power of life. Yet Anders turned his back on the Maker with his disobedience. A lazy student. Selfish. Petulant.

Anders had stood there naked but for the ring in his ear. He'd just laughed. Said: "And do tell me, Knight-Commander, how is it that my talent is _held back_ when you never let me leave here? Am I to lavish the Maker's blessings on every papercut in the archives? Someone has stubbed his toe? A bit of bad elbow-- and rubbing a little raw?" 

A templar threw balled-up robes at his chest, but he preferred to stand nude and smile.

Enchanter Wynne came into the chamber and frowned at him, deeply unimpressed. "There is a woman in the village who needs our care. I'll deliver the baby, and you will assist." 

"Are my hands to be chained the entire time?" He'd asked. "That will surely put her to ease." 

The templars rowed them across, Anders in hobbles, and Wynne staring out across the lake. Rumor said she'd had a child once, that she'd barely held it before they ripped it from her. Looking back, Anders wondered how she found the strength to go on, and even more, to help other women in that way. But at the time all he thought of were his own problems. Karl sounded strange in his last letter. Surana had made a friend of the handsome new templar. And there were hushed reports of strange creatures seen on the surface, dark things, things that bubbled up from the Deep Roads below...

A young woman and a goat awaited them in the village. She was astride a buckskin stallion that pitched back and forth, stamping its hoof. A beautiful woman, fierce, with a mass of impossibly curly gold ringlets. She was dressed like a farmhand, like a man. The goat was a long-eared brown-and-red type, and it munched a stand of weeds whilst eyeing them sidelong. A young man in the colors of the bann came riding up, then, on a flecked gray horse; he must have been one of the bann's sons, or in the retinue, a dark-skinned fellow of mixed Rivain and Fereldan heritage.

"Noreen's still holding on-- we see a foot," the woman called to them. "Mage! Can you ride?" 

Anders found himself bundled up on the woman's horse, and she spurred the stallion through a breakneck gallop and jump through all Honnleath. Anders thought he would surely die. Wynne showed much more horsemanship with the young Barris and the gray mare. At the end of it, horrified, especially with his ankles chained together, he was brought before a thatch-roofed cottage where a number of villagers clustered about in a muddy courtyard. 

The goat trotted up without a care.

Mia hauled him down and set him to rights. "Your life flash before your eyes?" she'd said to him, and he'd given a laugh of false bravado. For a moment he'd thought he'd seen her somewhere, but a woman's scream took his attention.

Noreen had been in labor since the night before. The babe hadn't flipped in the womb, and it wanted to come out sideways if at all. Wynne glided into the scene with wisdom and compassion, and she'd spread out her tool roll and the contents of her basket. She bade Anders to boil water, and she'd asked nearly all others present to leave the little cottage. 

The reality of the situation hit him full, and he felt the woman's terror, her pain. He had learned all the technicalities of childbirth, the physical process, the remedies. The cramping. The tearing. The entire constellation of agonizing consequences. He'd seen a few pregnancies in the tower-- one he feared now and again he might be responsible for-- but this was the first time he'd assisted a birth, to be there, to help her.

The midwife sponged the woman's head, looked up, and asked, "You'll do it, then?" And also, "Must he be here?"

Wynne had answered, gently, "Yes, I've done it a dozen times before," and also, "Young Frederick is my apprentice. He can be naughty, as you see, but he has a good heart, and he is the most talented healer we've had in ages."

Anders nearly knocked his head on the beams as he came back in to hear that. He'd hardly recalled a word of praise, but he knew she meant it. Wynne frustrated him-- kindly but aloof, with a tragic past, who had every reason to resent the control of the tower but never seemed to want a change for the better. Anders hadn't wanted his gifts. He'd only wanted to go home.

The enchanter cued him with a nod, and he went to Noreen's side, shuffling that way as best he could. It was more awkward given his height, but he had no care of that now. As soon as he laid his hand upon her head, the pain came away, and Noreen gasped with relief. Anders felt the spirits hovering around them, unseen, whispering about just beyond the veil. Lake Calenhad and its environs were old places, holy places, sacred to the wild people and their gods. The spirits here took animal form, when they manifested at all, and Anders had the sense of female creatures pressing in around them. 

He had the impression of a cow, broad-faced, wet-nosed, a kindly mother from the ginger cattle native to this land. 

_Please help her,_ Anders thought.

The child couldn't be pushed out now. The time for that had gone. Wynne knew a way to help, a method the Tevinters named for one of their archons. Wynne told the woman what she wanted to do, and how it would help, and Noreen nodded through tears. Just do it. Be done with it. There was only one way now to go.

Wynne took the knife from her tool roll and heated the blade in her hand. Anders brushed sweat-damp hair off Noreen's face, talked softly to her, and let his healing flow through. 

In minutes, Noreen was delivered of a girl, a child with a full head of black hair, squalling at the top of her lungs. 

Anders thought of the ginger cow, her long thick neck bended down, her flat muzzle snuffled to the woman's hair. _Thank you,_ he thought, eyes shut. _Thank you for your help._

Wynne and Anders left the woman a scar. A slight scar. Just enough for her body to remember. In the thatched-roof cottage, in the room with the bloody bed, Anders felt peace, a new purpose, wanting to do this and nothing else. The hobbles weighed now more than ever. What if he promised to stay here in the village? What if he didn't go? What if people brought their sick here, their wounded? Sometimes they brought their casualties to Kinloch, when their need was great, but so many died in the crossing. What would it hurt if he stayed here or in some village?

Later, in the rowboat, Anders broke the silence. "I want to be a healer," he said. "I want to stay in a village." 

Weary, Wynne had only looked at him and said, "Frederick... "

"I promise to stay there. They can rotate the templars. Fresh air-- a village." He reached across and laid a hand on her hand. "Wynne. There was a mage living in that village, Wilhelm. Why can he stay there, with his wife?"

"Wilhelm fought in the war with Orlais. He has a dispensation from the king."

"So he can tinker with his artifacts. Fuck about with his little projects. For what use? Wynne, I could heal those people! Anyone they brought. No cost. I felt the spirits there, wanting to help... "

Wynne only sighed, and Anders pressed, desperate now: "It's not fair he was favorite of the king. Is there a law, or isn't there? The Chantry tells us the Maker wants us shut up in our towers, but is the word of the king greater than that of God?"

When she said nothing in the few seconds he allotted her, Anders rushed out, "They even say there's a mage in Lothering, a healer, a runaway from the Marches. Not to mention what else they say of him! Is he above the law then also? Why?" 

"I've heard of Malcolm," Wynne told him. "He has a Grey Warden dispensation, and the local templars watch him. I know that you're upset, but in time, you'll come to understand... "

He never would. He never would see her way. He was told she was killed in the broken circle, throwing her body to shield the apprentices. But he'd seen her alive, somehow, in Amaranthine, a weird sheen to her eyes, but no other clue. She met him kindly, cordially, as he stood there in his new blue uniform. He healed the injured in Amaranthine then, tended their sick. 

"Better than the Deep Roads," he'd told Justice, when they sat together under the spreading branches of an oak. "I don't know why we even bother. Blight's done with."

And Justice intoned, in that deep hollow voice from the chest, "It is your duty, so you must do it."

"It is your duty, so you must do it," Anders mocked in a tinny voice. A fly landed on Anders' forehead. He brushed it away with the hand that held the forceps. "Rubbish."

He was suturing Kristoff's arm back to Kristoff's shoulder. The meat was falling off the bone these days, so it fit wrong, ball-and-socket. "That's your problem, Justice," he said. "You've no imagination."

"The Wardens are sworn to defend against the Blight," the spirit told him in words that carried. They sounded made of bronze, deep, powerful. The eyes were glazed over, like three-day fish, but there was a light kindled beneath them, weird and unreal.

"The Blight which is over, you know, by the way." Anders made his stitches small and neat. His healing magic had no power over flesh that was dead, so he made do as he could, to keep his friend together. "There will always be more darkspawn." 

Justice said nothing. 

"Does this hurt you?" Anders peered over his shoulder.

No answer, and Anders told him, "I just want to help. I know-- I know I'm a shit, like Nathaniel says. But I just. Fuck. I'm always doing what other people want me to. Go here, do this. The tower, and now Tabris. I want to be my own man. No one telling me anything."

Justice moved the arm of the body he inhabited. There wasn't so great a range of motion. He was declining in every way. "This will do," he said.

Anders waved away the flies, and set aside his suture kit. Sighing, he laid a hand on the shoulder, felt the _give_ beneath his hand. "If I ran way," he said quietly. "You'd say nothing, wouldn't you? I can twiddle my thumbs here.. or I could do real good elsewhere. I'd travel, heal people."

The gray head turned toward him, the eyes staring dully at him from their deep sockets, the flesh drawn tight around them. "This is your duty."

"It's what I was given to do," Anders replied. 

After the longest time, staring at each other, the flies around them, Anders said, softly, "You could come with me."


End file.
